This story probably began with a “baking challah with Mom” episode. Or “mandelbrot with Grandma.” Or “falafel with Dad.” Either way, at some point it morphed into the story of a girl with an addiction. An addiction to all things food. So the girl became a cookbook-hoarding, food-blog-obsessed, recipe-scribbling foodie. That’s right…one of those people who reads 10,000,000 food blogs a day, bookmarks 3,000 new recipes, checks out 20 cookbooks from the library at a time, sends her parents grocery lists by e-mail, and plans menus to prepare when she’s home from college. This is the story of a girl who likes cooking more than she likes eating (but don’t, by any means, underestimate her love of eating), a girl who loves feeding people and who takes pride in creating something divine (and edible, of course) from strange or boring ingredients. This is a girl who turns her nose up at boxed mixes and canned frosting (except in the infamous, urgent, “I live in a dorm” cases). And this is a girl who, before learning about RSS feeds and the like, bookmarked about 500 food blogs and diligently went through them every day, checking for updates and carefully copying/pasting recipes into word documents so that she could prepare them.

But then suddenly something happened. Well, not suddenly. Sure, there had been closeted inklings of foreshadowing, but not much more. So this “thing” did seem quite sudden. And what was this thing, you ask?

Lactose intolerance.

“Oh, the horror, the horror!” some might say.

So this girl was suddenly thrown into a whirlwind of “do-not-eat”s. No more yogurt (AGH!). No more butter. No more white chocolate. No more milk chocolate. No more milk powder-ladden things (and, oh, there are so many of them!). No more baked goods in most bakeries.